What does the word expat mean? Its traditional association is with wealthy outsiders lounging around pools in exotic locations, while being waited on hand and foot by the locals. But for Lulu Wang, whose parents migrated to the US from China when she was six years old, it is more complicated. “When I go back to visit my family, I’m not Chinese any more. Not really. But I look Chinese. I’m also not fully an American, but I’m not an immigrant, right? They don’t even understand what that is. And so I’m like, ‘Wait up. Am I an expat here?’ You know, I studied abroad in college, and I went back, and people thought I was the tour guide, because all my friends were white.”
This was the sensibility that animated her name-making 2019 film, The Farewell, a radiant semi-autobiographical account of a granddaughter summoned back to China to await her grandmother’s death, which won a handful of awards and was nominated for many more, including a Golden Globe and a Bafta. The buzz around The Farewell, coupled with the sensibility it projected, made her an obvious choice when Nicole Kidman was casting around for someone to adapt and direct her in a Hong Kong-set novel she had optioned. Janice YK Lee’s The Expatriates did indeed feature wealthy outsiders being waited on hand and foot. But Wang has updated it into something more widely nuanced, a six-part television series, Expats, that is at once glamorous, empathic and politically astute.
Wang, a neatly styled 40-year-old dressed in black, has flown over from her home in the US to introduce the series to the London Film Festival when we meet. As usual on her extensive promotional circuit, the episode she has chosen to present is not the first but the fifth. Given that the story is in part a nailbiter, premised on the search for a small child who has disappeared in a street market, this might seem perverse. I’m about to say so when Wang swoops in with a question of her own. It appears I’m the oddity, for watching the epsiodes in numerical order. “I’m sort of curious to talk to people who start with different ones. It’s my little experiment, I guess, to see if they bring different things. So what did you think coming in from one and then getting to five?” I’m so taken aback that I can’t think of anything very insightful to say. She nods politely, but returns to the question later on in the interview, genuinely interested in finding out more.
Though the series is not a sequencing gimmick, in the way of Netflix’s heist series Kaleidoscope – which made overheated claims for a bespoke viewing experience – it takes full advantage of the new freedoms of streaming. From the viewpoint of someone who started from the beginning, it tells of a collision between three female expats – a disoriented young Korean American and two older women whose households include their live-in domestic servants who cater to their every need while submitting to the fiction that they are cherished friends.
The fifth episode punctures that narrative. At 96 minutes long, it is by some way the longest. Titled Central, it flips the camera around to the perspective of two communities that are all but invisible to the pampered elite. One is the huge population of largely Filipina domestic “helpers”, who gather in the central business district for a communal picnic every Sunday. Women like Essie (Ruby Ruiz), helper to Kidman’s Margaret, who have left their own families for a life of devoted service, who set off with their plastic containers to be themselves for their single day off. The other is the protesters of the “umbrella movement” of 2014 – the year in which the story is set – whose colourful, brolly-twirling passive resistance to mainland-directed oppression made them, too, outsiders of a sort.
The episode is a coup de theatre, rendered all the more dramatic by being dropped in so late on. It is also a riposte to those who questioned the point of a series about expats at a time when Hong Kong has so many more pressing stories to offer. Grumbles in the local press reached a crescendo during filming in 2021, with reports that Covid quarantine rules had been waived for Kidman, prompting a government statement that exemption was legally permissible in the pursuit “designated professional work”.
Wang herself and the rest of her crew submitted to the 21-day isolation regardless, she says, for both location scouting and filming itself. “I brought my cinematographer, my production designer, my producer, my composer, my editor, a whole load of people I made The Farewell with. And we’d never done anything on this scale,” she says. “I don’t know if it’ll be the hardest thing I’ll ever do. But it certainly felt that way, because of the length of it. I was in the middle of it, directing all six episodes as well as showrunning. And a lot of the people that would normally come out, couldn’t or didn’t, because of the pandemic. And how do you get all of these extras and keep them safe? But we were also incredibly lucky, because at the time Hong Kong had this zero Covid policy, so the borders were closed, and people could only travel there for business.”
The writers’ room was all female, but diverse in terms of ethnicity and life circumstances, with a direct impact on both storyline and characterisation. “It’s not like I intentionally set out for it to be all women,” she insists. “ I just thought, in putting the room together, there were enough interesting perspectives. Though there was a moment - and I don’t remember if I was joking - when I was like, ‘Do we need more diversity?’ Do we need a man to make sure that we’re not missing that point of view? And all of us were like, ‘No, we’re good.’ We know what their point of view is; we’ve seen it plenty.”
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Wang’s own perspective has been shaped by life on two continents, starting in Beijing, until her parents were forced into exile in 1989. She doesn’t speak Cantonese and had only ever visited Hong Kong as a tourist. “But when I left Beijing, it was during [the] Tiananmen Square [protests]. And I’d never seen Tiananmen Square commemorated because it’s not on the Chinese mainland, and in America it’s certainly not marked. So being in Hong Kong, and seeing 4 June commemorated was incredibly emotional for me. I knew that I had to capture the umbrella movement and the spirit of what was going on in Hong Kong, while juggling all of these different identities and perspectives from my own point of view.”
She has a brother who is 11 years younger, and now a chef in Los Angeles. The age gap was partly due to China’s one child policy, she points out. “So unfortunately, my parents were not able to have the kids that came between us, which is a whole tragedy of its own for them.” Both have pretty interesting stories, she adds. She doesn’t want to give away too much because she is collaborating with them to tell those stories properly - via a book with her mother, a literary critic, and an autobiographical podcast with her father, who was at one time a Chinese diplomat in the Soviet Union.
How much does she remember of her early childhood? “It’s hard for me to know if they’re my own memories, or just what my parents have told me,” she says. “I remember my father crying, when he sent us off to my grandmother’s house because he had his visa for America.” Originally, they were supposed to go together, “but when Tiananmen happened, the family decided that it was best for him to get out while he still could, because we just didn’t know what the future of the country was going to be. There was a lot of terror about whether we would all see each other again.”
One of the first things her parents did after being reunited in Miami, where her father had enrolled for a PhD, was to save up to buy a piano for her, continuing a love-hate relationship with the instrument that dominated her childhood. “I play piano because my mother always wanted to play and was never given that opportunity, and how do you quit after you have that story in your mind?” she says. Though she loved music itself, she felt stifled by the classical repertoire – “all these beautiful works of white men who are long gone.”
At a liberal arts college in Boston, she majored in music and creative writing with a minor in international studies. “I had no idea what I was doing. I was like: let me just get all these degrees. And then in my senior year of college, when I had done everything I was supposed to do, I had a few electives leftover, so I decided to take a film one, because I thought it would be fun. And maybe it’d be easy. And of course, then, I immediately fell in love with it.”
In defiance of her parents’ ambitions for her, she turned down a law scholarship in order to make documentary shorts about overfishing in Panama and the outcast Dalit caste in Nepal. Then she took herself off to Los Angeles, “because I wanted to move into narrative features and write screenplays and I didn’t have the money to go to film school. I couldn’t ask my parents because they were very against this whole decision to forgo law school. So I just sort of taught myself.” Wang’s is a classic story of apparent overnight success that is in fact the result of years of determination and graft. She made her feature debut in 2014 with Posthumous, an art world satire set in Berlin. But it wasn’t until The Farewell that she attracted serious attention.
The years of piano practice have not been wasted: she plays on the soundtracks of both Expats and The Farewell. “Having that background gave me so many things, you know – my sense of rhythm when I write or edit. I’m always hearing music in my head.” She pauses for a moment, then adds: “I think so many choices that I made when I was younger were either out of guilt, obligation or the reverse of that, rebellion. And through film, what I’m navigating is not to be fighting something all the time, and just to tell stories that make me feel more human.”
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Wang now lives between New York and Los Angeles with Barry Jenkins, director of the Oscar-winning Moonlight and the TV serialisation of Colson Whitehead’s novel The Underground Railroad, and their dog, Chauncey JaMarcus Wang-Jenkins. Chauncey – a handsome poodle-retriever cross chosen because Jenkins is allergic to dog hair and he doesn’t moult – is their pampered baby. He has his own Instagram account and travelled with Wang to Hong Kong to make an enthusiastic cameo appearance in Expats. “Oh you spotted that,” she squeals delightedly when I mention it. “He did his own voice work. If anyone wants a dog for a film, he’s open to offers.”
She jokes that there was no point in asking Jenkins what he thought of any scenes in which Chauncey was involved because he didn’t notice anything else. How does it feel to become half of one of Hollywood’s new power couples? “To be honest,” she says, “it can be challenging, because I’ve always created my whole life from a space of ‘nobody wants to see this, nobody cares.’ And that can be really freeing. And then suddenly to be in this other space, where I’m working with Nicole Kidman, and with a big studio, it’s like, ‘Okay, well, how do I create from this space?’. How do we protect ourselves mentally and creatively? How do we stay amateurs, you know, because that’s something that matters a lot to both of us.”
One of the couple’s solutions is to mentor young filmmakers. “That’s something that’s really important to us,” says Wang. “Speaking for myself, I want to stay close to that side of things. I didn’t go to film school. I didn’t grow up with a Super 8 camera in my hands, and so I feel like I’m a perpetual student. And maybe that’s not a bad thing. I don’t want to repeat what I did before and make something based on expectations. I want every film that I make to explore something, and I want to challenge myself and continue to take risks.”
Expats is a case in point. Besides its structural originality, it plays against cultural stereotype, pointing out – among other things – that not all high-flying expats are white, and not all women want to be mothers. Two of the most troublingly intense relationships explore the asymmetrical dependencies between the expat women and their long-suffering “helpers”.
“I always wanted to explore the intersectionality of class and race and gender, and I think that often in America, we talk about these things in a separated way,” says Wang. “Hong Kong is so great, because it’s this intersection of very different walks of life, and you get to see all of the nuances. And I just wanted not to vilify anybody, but really just take the audience through a journey on which you might sympathise with someone and then they’ll do something that you disagree with, or you might hate them, but then come around to loving them. We’re at this moment in time where everything is so polarised, people are either heroes to be worshipped or they’re cancelled, so I wanted to show that these characters are all human and that everyone, regardless of their circumstance, is fighting their own battle, which in their world is a huge one.”
Poignantly the old Hong Kong that Expats depicts, in the romantic, neon-lit tradition of Wong Kar-wai, is disappearing. One of the series’ most atmospheric locations, a 72-year-old cafe, closed shortly after filming, “I think we captured a moment in time,” says Wang. “But despite all of the boundaries, and the walls being put up, I’m not sure that we can stop migration, you know, because ultimately – and maybe this will sound like spiritual woowoo – I believe that we’re moving from a tribal to a global consciousness. The world is getting smaller, there’s climate change and turmoil of all kinds, so we have to find a way to live together. We just have to.”
• Expats will premiere on Prime Video on 26 January
